BlockchainGandalf

Today I have a brief introduction to the InterPlanetary File System for you, from a browser user's perspective.

People are now familiar with typing HTTPS:// into the address bar of a browser (even though most don't know what it means), and the idea of domains (you know, things like www.thinklair.com), and that web pages are tacked on to the end of domains.

But we're now seing the IPFS making an appearance in some browsers, for example in Brave, where you can type IPFS://

In this episode I talk a bit about what that means, and why it might be significant in the future.

Bryan Sanya Mondoh pointed me at yet another nine-figure loss in the cryptocurrency and DeFi space - trading platform BXH lost $130 million.

And an accompanying offer from the exploited exchange to the hackers offering a bonus and wiping the slate clean if they returned the funds. There's a $1 million bounty on offer.

This is seriously broken. The message that is being sent out goes against all that has been achieved in providing bug bounties and recognized systems for people who find weaknesses in software to be rewarded for their discovery.

It also highlights how pathetic bug bounties have been. Uniswap offers half a million tops, Aave a quarter, and Compound's maximum reward is 150k. Most bug bounties are a few thousand at best.

And you have to prove that the bug you've found is severe and certain to be exploited, disclose it discretely within a short period of time, with lots of supporting documentation, and the team in question has to actually agree with you.

Which I imagine is similar to getting an insurance company to pay out a significant claim.

More on that in this episode.

There are three problems with artwork NFTs at the moment:

Through the use of capped Automated Market Makers and an interesting token-to-license path, Vitomir Jevremovic is aiming to solve all of those problems in one go.

In this video, I talk about the mechanism he is proposing.

(Full disclosure: I hold no tokens or equity in the NFT-PRO project.)

I'm not the only inventor on the block.

I've had quite a few conversations with Vitomir Jevremovic recently about a new concept he's come up with - the capped AMM.

It's an interesting DeFi concept that he's built a prototype for, which places an upper limit on how much of one of the tokens in the token pair the contract can hold.

In this video, I briefly explain how AMMs work, and then cover what different properties the cap adds to the AMM. They relate to price-discovery, and an alternate way of releasing a token into a finance ecosystem.

As it's a very new idea, it may have all sorts of other unexpected applications and properties that will become apparent over time.

See Vitomir's write-up at https://docs.all.art/protocol/camm for more details.

Vitomir is using it to provide increased liquidity in the NFT licensing market, and how he plans to do this is the topic of my next video.

Milly Perry asked me, "I wonder if you could go beyond the 'usual suspects' (digital assets) to the physical assets or into the future?"

And so in this episode, I start from basic building blocks, talk about the meaning of ownership, what a cryptocurrency represents, what a fungible token could, and then with that foundation I move on to non-fungible tokens.

Physical assets are reached about a third of the way in, and the future is two-thirds of the way through the episode.

And yet I've only just scratched the surface.

In the late eighties the World Wide Web was invented, and has since proved to be one of the most transformative recent technologies.

One of the reasons for this is that it has developed to become ubiquitous and highly useable. With Web 2.0, interactiveness was introduced, allowing anyone with a mobile phone or desktop to create and disseminate content.

In this episode, as part of the Unit Masters Program, I talk about the up-and-coming Web 3.0 - which promises to remove many of the walled gardens and central authorities that have arisen to profit form Web 2.0, and change the way we transaction and engage in commerce.

(Visit http://unitmasters.org for more.)

I was watching a video by John Oliver, in which he quotes a shocking statistic.

85% of hospitals do not have an onsite computer security professional.

We all understand why physical guards are needed at hospitals, airports, and places like that.

Why don't we have the same attitude towards protecting the virtual world in which all our essential data lives?

In fifty years (or if we're lucky, perhaps just five), people are going to look back at this era and wonder why we were so cavalier and foolish.

You've planned your DeFi or smart contract project, advertised it, and there's interest in it. What do you do next?

Issue a token, of course!

But is that always the right thing to do? Are the better (and possibly more ethical) choices?

More about that in this episode.

Today I am talking about standards - which are good things to have, but as is always the case with good things, they also have their downside.

In the episode, I look at the ERC20, ERC721 and ERC1155 standards in the world of smart contracts, and discuss why the latter isn't winning out over the other two yet.

Capitalism is all about turning a profit from the wealth that you have, without having to do any work. And crypto assets are capital, but how can you use those assets to your advantage without lifting a finger? After all, that's what "passive income" is all about.

In this episode, I talk about some of the DeFi protocols out there that allow you to deposit your virtual wealth and then see it increase.

If you're lucky.